One of the most common questions we get asked from customers is “Can I promote my contest by creating a contest page within Facebook?”. I almost always answer that question with another question “Are you trying to promote your contest to as many social followers as possible no matter where they are?”. In all cases the answer is “Yes!”. So let’s discuss new right way to do this!
To embed or not to embed?
So how do I embed or promote my contest using Facebook? Before we look at answering this, let’s look at a few facts. Of the 1.59+ Billion users that access Facebook per month, over 1.44+ Billion users access Facebook from their mobile device. That’s a whopping 90% of all users access Facebook via their mobile.
Even more compelling is that of that 1.44+ Billion users, 823 Million users only access Facebook from their mobile device. That’s over 50% that will never see a Facebook page via their desktop!
“So?” I hear you say. “Isn’t that why it is critical to reach our audience by embedding our contest in Facebook?”. The answer is a resounding “That’s exactly the reason why you don’t want to embed your website in Facebook!”
Because guess what, Facebook doesn’t display embedded websites through its mobile interface. That’s right, you have just hidden your contest campaign from over 50% of your Facebook audience.
Ok so what if I still want to embed?
Haven’t convinced you yet. Ok well there is a way to embed your contest site into your Facebook site. This is done using a Facebook App such as “Static HTML”. This allows you to embed any website (including your Launchpad6 Contest microsite) into a Facebook iframe.
There is a video here on which describes how to do this in about 5 minutes:
This will work on any desktop however not on mobile devices.
Ok, great, But what about my mobile users? Well this is where there is a better way to promote your contest using Facebook and in fact this works for Twitter and other social networks as well.
What is the better way to promote my contest using Facebook?
If we remember the question in the introduction: “Are you trying to promote your contest to as many social followers as possible no matter where they are?”. If your answer is “Yes” then you need to use the most powerful and inherent feature of Facebook to achieve this, Posts!
Facebook’s main focus is to share and promote using the humble and simple post. So how do I use posts to persistently promote my contest?
It can be done in 3 easy steps!
Setup your Launchpad6 contest site and capture the contest landing page URL
Create a post on your Facebook page that links to the contest landing page
Pin your post to the top of your Page.
Pinning your post to the top of your Facebook organisation page is easy. Just go to the Contest post you just created with your contest hero image or video, description and URL. Select the drop down option and then select “Pin to Top”.
Once you have done this the Contest campaign link will constantly appear at the top of your posts feed for a period of 7 days. You now have a compelling promotion of your contest for all your Facebook site visitors that appears smack in line with your main page!
To un-post just select the same drop down on the post and unpin the post.
To keep people engaged update your post each week and pin it again to your page. This will keep people engaged. Even capture stats from your contest and display them in your post to entice people to join in!
Ok, so what about Twitter?
Well Twitter is also a great way to promote your contest to your followers. So the great news is that Twitter has the same feature that allows you to pin tweets to your profile page.
Just select your tweet that you created for your contest and select the down arrow option as above and select “Pin to your profile page” and that’s it.
Can you do the same this with other social networks?
Simple answer is yes, some. Google+ supports the same feature to pin posts to your profile page. Reddit also supports pinning posts.
So you can achieve the same type of consistent engagement using other social networks.
Conclusion
So as you can see there are much more effective ways to promote your contest on Facebook and other social networks without reverting to messy iFrames and limited mobile engagement. Using good old Posts and Tweets leverage the core power of the platforms and it couldn’t be easier to achieve.
This blog has only scratched the surface on techniques to promote your contest using social networks, however using pinned posts is one of the most effective, easy and often least utilised features of social network platforms.
Look out for future posts where we discuss other techniques to drive more contest engagement to your latest contest campaign.